“Mathematics possesses not only truth, but also supreme beauty”

What did he mean by this? Do you believe him? Have you ever seen anything in maths that you think is beautiful?

When considering what to put in this post, I had to sift through literally dozens of beautiful and mysterious things that I’ve seen in maths including:

The idea that all natural numbers (except one) can be made by just multiplying together prime numbers. What is a prime number?

That insects called cicadas spend most of their lives underground as grubs but then pupate and come out of their burrows after 13 or 17 years (prime numbers) after which they live for only a few weeks. Why is this interesting? It is thought that they do this because it would make it hard for predators to have evolved that could specialise in eating only the cicadas. If instead they appeared in intervals which were not prime numbers, say every 15 years, predators appearing every 1, 3 and 5 years would definitely meet (and eat) them. Amazing!

Pythagoras’ Theorem about how you can work out the length of sides in right angled triangles. The history of this one is amazing, seeing how he proved it with only geometry rather than with algebra.

The idea of irrational numbers. Those are the ones that have an infinite number of non repeating numbers after the decimal point. I find this fascinating because infinity is such a hard idea to get your head around.

All these things are interesting, but, for me there has always been one thing that totally amazed me and it’s to do with a really simple bit of maths that seems to appear in all sorts of different places in nature: Fibonacci Numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to our blog!

We are passionate about maths and want to share our enthusiasm with everyone! We set up this site so we could post fun and useful articles that interest anyone! Join us by subscribing to the site in the box above! Check out the other services that we offer like Online Tutoring and the Teacher Help Club. We really hope you enjoy our site!

Search blog

Subscribe to our blog!

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Blog Stats

Our Visitors

Pictures and logo

The logo in the header is available free under a GNU license. The author of this fantastic picture is Mehran Moghtadaei.

We use the excellent website www.FreeFoto.com for many of our images. If you click on pictures that were from this site you'll be directed to www.FreeFoto.com

We do our very best to credit everyone for the photos, links, quotes etc used on our site. In the unlikely event that we haven't attributed something correctly, please get in touch and we'll correct things as quickly as we can.